Well I’m in the process of ordering books for my MBA classes and one thing that hasn’t changed since the last time I was in college it is the ridiculous cost of college text books.   What really gets my blood boiling is the incessant distribution of new editions when there is hardly anything new in edition x than from edition x-1.

I have a proposal to solve this problem, the government should mandate that publishers should release a digest between editions that encompass all the changes from edition x to edition x+1.   By doing this we’ll get the full benefit of recycling older additions while minimizing the publishing costs of reprinting a full book where the only difference is the color of the book and a couple of paragraphs of content.

Like the movie and music industry, the book publishers have to know what they have coming to them by now if they don’t change – massive book pirating when books go mostly digital.   From my orientation, the professors stated that most students were using electronic editions of the books and yet the costs haven’t come down…hmmm….why is that?  Publishers used to claim that publishing costs kept growing ever year as inflation eroded their profits because of the high cost of ink, paper, and labor to print, bind and distribute books but a funny thing happened on the way to the publishing shop…it became obsolete!

So what’s the excuse now book publishers?  Electron transfers inside a copper wire are crippling your profitability?

I understand capitalism and free markets but I don’t understand unsatisfiable greed when it comes to college text books.  It’s all about expanding people’s knowledge morons!   I don’t know the real statistics but I’ll venture to guess that an educated person is about 50% less likely to commit crime or at least violent crime.   An educated society is better than an uneducated society and all you need to do is look no further than any fourth world country where there is 90% illiteracy to understand the truth to this statement.

In the near future, just like the health care crisis we face today, we’ll have a college cost crisis and I can already here the pointless bickering between the red and the blue as fewer and fewer people have access to education.   Hey maybe the health insurance industry can sell “college book insurance” policies instead once they get the boot from Obama but then again Obama II might institute “start of college life counseling” which would be so controversial it would be stripped from the bill…ignorant college students are fairly profitable after all.